Turkey’s Stray Dogs, Once ‘Masters of the Road,’ Face New Peril

Special to The Washington Post · Beril Eski

16:50 JST, September 4, 2024

ISTANBUL – At his shelter on the outskirts of Istanbul, Murat Cem Yetkin refers to his dozens of stray dogs as “the kids.”

There is Handsome, the pudgy hound, and a massive Kangal Shepherd named Sarin. Cared for and relatively free, they roam Yetkin’s rambling property – and are now among the luckier canines in Turkey.

This summer, the parliament passed a law to regulate the country’s roughly 4 million stray dogs. It requires municipalities to round up strays and put them in an overcrowded shelter network, and to euthanize dogs that are feral.

Animal rights activists, fearing a mass culling, have dubbed it the “massacre law.”

The measure was introduced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, prompted in part by highly publicized dog attacks, including on children. But it has drawn outrage in a country where a committed cadre of citizens have long cared for street animals, leaving food and water on the stoops and corners of Turkey’s cities, towns and villages, in a practice that dates back hundreds of years.

The law has stoked Turkey’s political divides, as well: Some mayors belonging to the political opposition have said they will not implement it, under threat of incarceration.

Activists say they fear that the killing of dogs is already underway. In a neighborhood on the outskirts of Ankara, Turkey’s capital, they recently filmed what they said were the corpses of canines dumped in plastic bags in dirt ditches. Haydar Ozkan, deputy chairman of the Animals’ Rights to Live Confederation, said he witnessed “a terrible scene” in the neighborhood, called Altindag.

Authorities collected some of the bodies as evidence and a prosecutor in Ankara opened an investigation, local media reported. In a statement, the municipality denied that the dogs had been killed by the government, saying the site was a graveyard for canines who “died of natural causes, traffic accidents or infections.” The local mayor is a well-known animal lover, the statement said.

Another video that circulated on social media last week appeared to show a man stabbing a puppy repeatedly with a pitchfork, on the side of a road in a rural area outside Turkey’s capital, Ankara. When someone filming the man asks, “Where is the state?” the man replies, “the state passed a law to kill these dogs.” The puppy was killed and police later arrested the stabber, local media reported.

“There is no way to stop these massacres unless they withdraw the law,” Ozkan said.

The first draft of the legislation, circulated in May, proposed killing stray dogs that were not adopted from shelters within a month. After a backlash, including protests, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party presented a watered-down version in July. The government defended the measure as the only solution to dog attacks, traffic accidents involving the animals, and outbreaks of disease, including rabies.

Families of injured children demanded action, as media outlets circulated photos of victims of dog attacks from the last year. The attention suggested a spike in such attacks, though there are no official figures confirming an increase.

Still, the population of stray dogs has been increasing “exponentially” every year, Erdogan told members of his party in a speech in June. They “attack children, adults, elderly people and other animals,” he said.

“Do not compromise,” Erdogan added, referring to the measure’s passage. “God willing, we will finish this.”

The campaign to crack down on strays was fueled in part by New Welfare, a conservative Islamist political party founded by Fatih Erbakan, the son of Erdogan’s mentor. After the party’s unexpected success in recent local elections, it vowed to remove the dogs from the streets.

The party’s mayor in Sanliurfa followed through in June, after rabid dogs bit at least two people in the southeastern city.

The ubiquity of stray dogs has long been a feature of daily life in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, as have attempts to control the size of their population. In his book “Constantinople,” the Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis described late-19th-century Istanbul as “one huge dog-kennel.”

“They are the masters of the road,” he wrote.

“Every one knows how the Turks love and protect them, but just why they do so is not so easy to decide,” he continued, while scrambling for explanations including superstition and religion. Like other foreign visitors over the years, he acknowledged that the dogs – “without collars or masters or kennels or homes or laws” – were unmatched as scavengers that controlled waste in the city. They were “willing … to eat pretty much everything short of stones,” he wrote.

But there were also efforts to control the dog population, including mass killings. The most systematic and violent attempt was in 1910, during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when more than 80,000 dogs were transported to Sivriada, a small island off Istanbul, and left with no food or water.

Twenty years later, a New York Times article on Istanbul’s “plague” of strays noted that the “masterless” dogs roaming the streets were frightening people, and were of a “stronger breed” than their predecessors banished to the island.

Over the past two decades, however, activists and lawmakers have tried to enshrine protections for animals, including in 2004, when Turkey was pushing to join the European Union, and in 2021, when the parliament approved a law mandating harsh punishments for animal abuse and reclassified animals as “living things,” rather than commodities.

But the laws have not improved the availability or quality of shelters, which Ozkan, the rights activist, likened to “death camps.” Footage of a municipal worker beating a dog to death in a shelter in the central city of Konya two years ago drew nationwide outrage, and the scene was condemned by Erdogan, who along with his wife, Emine, adopted a disabled shelter dog during the pandemic.

Out of Turkey’s 1,403 municipalities, Ozkan said, 1,100 do not have any shelters. The new law mandates the construction of shelters or improvements to existing ones by 2028.

In June, thousands of animal lovers gathered in central Istanbul to protest the measure. Esra Dincer, 49, who attended with her daughter, held a banner that read, “Spay, love and protect,” along with a photo of her hugging a big, blond cat. The family takes care of seagulls, hedgehogs, stray cats and dogs in their neighborhood, and have two cats and a fish at home.

“When I was a child, they shot dogs right before our eyes because of the increased population. Now, they’ll kill them with injections. The consequences don’t change as long as you don’t solve the problem,” she said.

Yetkin, the shelter owner, said that the crackdown on the dogs was a long time coming and that all Turkey’s political parties were responsible. Over the years, instead of neutering, spaying and returning strays to the streets, municipalities – whatever party controlled them – left dogs in neglected shelters or dumped them into the woods.

Even before he opened his shelter, at a house he rented in May, Yetkin was among the many in the country who have stepped in to provide care when the authorities did not, feeding the dogs banished to the wilderness over the past decade.

A part-time factory technician, Yetkin has adhered to a strict routine since opening the shelter, feeding the dogs beginning at 5.a.m, cleaning their kennels and medicating the sick.

The shelter, crisscrossed with wires and covered with blue plastic sheets, is becoming crowded, and keeping peace among the dogs – the elderly, the young, the aggressive – is a daily challenge. But there are more dogs to save.

On a recent afternoon, Yetkin drove to the woods, looking for an elderly female dog he had seen earlier and hauling bags of food in his white Fiat to feed the strays. “There are endless ways of dying here, and it’s painful,” Yetkin said. He started soliciting donations a few years ago to help feed and care for the animals.

He honked his car horn and whistled. Dark shadows emerged: skinny dogs inching toward him, some dangling plastic trackers from their ears, a sign that they had been neutered. But the elderly female was not among them.

“Maybe she fell asleep in the shade,” Yetkin said. “Or maybe she is never coming back.”